‘Break a leg,’ he interrupted. ‘Sorry, I can’t stop. Got a case myself this morning.’

‘Aye, but the courts are that way,’ she reminded him, glancing back over his head. ‘You’re off outside for a last fag, and that means you’ve got five minutes. Come on, I’ll keep you company.’

‘Bollocks,’ he said with a sigh, before resuming his progress towards the main doors with huffy bad grace.

She waited for him to light up and have a draw, conscious that she’d get nothing until the nicotine hit.

‘Know who I was talking to last night?’ she asked. ‘Gary Fleeting.’

He rolled his eyes, confirming that he knew this was coming.

‘And how was he?’ he said through gritted teeth.

‘Well, for a bloke who got lifted in possession of that much brown, I’d have expected him to look, I don’t know, a bit more prisony. What happened, Dom?’

‘Scottish justice moves in mysterious ways,’ he said wearily. He closed his fist then opened it again, palm up, a gesture of something disappearing or flying away. Catherine recognised the mannerism, having often seen Ruaraidh Wilson do it in court, usually as he was making some key piece of evidence suddenly seem tangential or irrelevant. For a guy who was supposedly determined to be unlike his father, he was helluva like his father. The apple clearly hadn’t fallen far, which rather made a nonsense of the jokes and innuendo suggesting that his becoming a zealous prosecutor was proof that he was actually the product of an affair. It was the kind of thing cops told each other to make themselves feel better about Wilson Senior’s occult powers thwarting their best efforts.

Indeed, the same embittered cops peddling this stuff had previously been happy enough to identify Dominic as his father’s son during more troubled times. In his teens and student years, he had threatened to go seriously off the rails, reputedly due to his stormy relationship with Wilson père. There had been problems with drink and hard drugs, resulting in several arrests.

They might also have resulted in a few convictions and more than a few lurid headlines had it not been for surprising levels of compassion and discretion on the part of certain senior police officers. At the time, Catherine was a shade resentful of a poor little rich kid being indulged, wondering how often such understanding was extended to those from less esteemed backgrounds. However, she would have had to concede that being the only child of a phenomenally successful but slightly strange and unquestionably workaholic individual such as Ruaraidh Wilson QC must have brought its own difficulties.